Systems and methods herein generally relate to printing and scanning systems/methods and more particularly to identifying user marks using patterned lines on pre-printed forms.
Existing mark lifting technology is a technology that attempts to “lift” or extract handwriting or other hand-written marks from a digital scan of a page or other surface on which someone has made the marks, and is performed usually for the purpose of then processing the lifted marks to “read” them via intelligent character recognition (ICR) technology. Mark lifting technology usually requires that the person doing the handwriting make their marks inside a box. The box demarcates where the lifting software will look for the marks and is usually printed on the page on which the person makes their marks.
This requirement to keep all of the marks inside the box can be difficult and/or unnatural for a person if they usually write on a line, especially for text that normally goes below the line because, to keep all of the marks inside the box, the user needs to write the characters “floating” inside the box. A technological problem exists with such systems because, even if a line (to write or draw on) is printed inside the box, the mark lifting technology that separates that line from the person's marks results in the removal of a significant amount of the person's marks in the vicinity of the line being removed. This distorts the person's marks and thus leads to poor quality ICR results.